Still/moving images. Il rapporto dialettico tra cinema e fotografia nelle pratiche artistiche contemporanee.

Among the numerous consequences of the advent of the digital age, the redefinition of the boundaries between still and moving images is certainly one of the deepest. Closely connected to the changes that are now occurring in film studies and art history, this redefinition requires a rethinking of the traditional borders between cinema and photography. Adopting perspectives belonging to New Film History, media archaeology, art theory and visual studies, the present work aims at exploring the existence of a dialectical relationship between cinema and photography. This dialectic is understood in a double sense: on the one hand, as a constitutive tension between two media that are inextricably linked in shaping time, movement, immobility, instant and duration, and, on the other hand as a new paradigm in contemporary art. The dissertation is subdivided into three chapters. In the first one the dialectical relationship between movement and stillness is the key to understanding some connections between early cinema's aesthetic of attraction, chronophotography and avant-garde. The second chapter considers the emergence, since the 1990s, of artistic practices that aim at employing cinema and photography in order to reflect current aesthetic and technological conditions. The third chapter offers a critical overview of the case study of GIF art. GIF is an obsolete digital format that allows images to be produced that seem to be simultaneously still and moving; in the present work, GIF is discussed as a medium able to contradict the boundaries between still and moving images, suggesting furthermore a possible conceptual model for thinking about time and history in a discontinuous way.